


in full costume dress

by sarapod (four_right_chords)



Category: Superstore (TV)
Genre: Bi Jonah, F/M, Gambling Addict Jonah
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-07
Updated: 2018-02-07
Packaged: 2019-03-11 09:38:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13521534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/four_right_chords/pseuds/sarapod
Summary: When Jonah tells Amy how he wound up in St. Louis and at Cloud 9, he flat-out lies.





	in full costume dress

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Growin' Up by Bruce Springsteen.

When Jonah tells Amy how he wound up in St. Louis and at Cloud 9, he flat-out lies.

He didn’t plan to - he thinks, later, that he would have come up with a better story if he had - but she’s so pretty, he likes her so much, and it seems like destroying the stock room is turning into a bonding thing? So when she confesses that she’s taking college classes, he wants to give her something in exchange. Unfortunately, the level at which he’s not ready to talk about what actually happened in Chicago is pretty dramatic, which he doesn’t realize until he’s already started talking, so he panics, and lies. Badly. It’s not even close to the dumbest lie Jonah’s ever told - he is a recovering gambling addict, he has told some of the stupidest lies known to man - but he’s pretty sure it would make most normal people’s top ten.

What strikes him that night, lying on his cousin Damian’s lumpy-ass couch and failing to fall asleep, is that Amy seemed to buy it. His story was nonsensical to the point of absurdity, but she didn’t blink. He would have blinked. He would have stopped whoever he was talking to mid-sentence and asked them a million and one questions until their stupid anecdote made sense. But Amy didn’t even seem to realize that he’d said something weird, and it doesn’t add up. She’s not stupid, and she’s not self-absorbed enough for him to believe it just didn’t register - he knows she was listening to what he had to say. So he decides she must have been minding her own business, trusting that she’d get the full story someday and assuming he had his own reasons for holding back.

Or maybe she hadn’t thought about it that hard. Maybe not asking a lot of questions is just kind of …. how people are, here.

The more Jonah thinks about it, the more that fits into the picture of life at Cloud 9. For all that his coworkers are nosy gossips, they mostly don’t pry, relying instead on the grapevine for what they want to know about each other and making assumptions (rightly or wrongly) to fill in the gaps. Amy isn’t going to ask him a million questions about where he comes from, and if he says something insane, well, then he says something insane. The corollary, he realizes, is that as long as he’s willing to be a little bit of a punching bag for his coworkers, he never has to tell anyone a goddamn thing.

He sleeps more soundly that night than he has since moving to St. Louis. He doesn’t even care about the dip in the couch cushion where the frame digs into his side.

* * *

It’s not like Jonah’s lying all the time. He’s still him. He can’t hide his politics or his opinions, and he doesn’t want to. He knows he can be a little pretentious, but his tastes are such that everyone he knows now thinks he’s pretentious even when he’s being sincere, so he just openly likes what he likes. He’s awkward and corny and pretty bad at reading the room. None of that changes. There’s just things he doesn’t talk about now. When anyone asks, he says he flunked out of business school. People assume he comes from money and he lets them. People assume he’s straight and he lets them. It’s easier than fighting every assumption everyone makes, and more importantly, it lets him protect the stuff he genuinely doesn't want to talk about. It’s fine. He’s fine. He likes his job and he likes his coworkers and he really, really likes Amy. He likes Amy most.

* * *

Here are some things that are true about Jonah.

He kissed his first girl when he was 12, behind the bleachers at a high school baseball game. Her name was Katey Gonzalez, and the crush he had on her was absolutely devastating. Her family moved away the week after they kissed, and he went down by the railroad tracks and burned the note in which she’d agreed to go to the game with him as a symbol of his broken heart. He didn’t realize until she angrily instant messaged him a few weeks later that the note had also had her contact information on it. By then she had taken his lack of outreach as a lack of interest, and moved on to a new boy in her new town. It may have happened almost twenty years ago, but Jonah still knows exactly how he’d apologize to Katey if he ran into her now. He would never want a woman to think his lack of initiative in contacting her was a reflection of her value as a human being.

He kissed his first guy when he was 17 in an isolated corner of a parking deck. Anthony was gay, out, and “liked to turn straight boys.” Jonah was still dumb enough to believe that he could be a straight boy while wanting to kiss Anthony. It was extremely good. They only stopped when the third set of too-close headlights made it clear that “isolated” was a very relative way to describe any part of a parking deck in Chicago. The main things Jonah realized were that he liked kissing Anthony exactly as much as he liked kissing any of the girls he’d ever kissed, and that he should probably reconsider “straight” at some point.

The first time he gambled was at a carnival. He was 5. His dad gave him a quarter to put down on the spinning wheel, and he won a teddy bear. He wanted another quarter. He wanted another quarter. He wanted another quarter.

* * *

Jonah’s life to date has included a varied list of hard and stupid things, and he knows logically that what he’s feeling can’t be true, but watching Amy walk away with Adam and Emma after the tornado sure feels like it’s headed towards the top of that list with a bullet. Going home only to find out that Damian’s apartment has been wiped off the map feels fitting, somehow.

He gets a text from Amy later that night while he’s sitting on the curb across from what used to be his building. It says about what he expects, but it’s somehow still a gut punch: _thank you for today. i think i need time. Adam and i aren’t sure what we’re doing and i can’t let anything pull my focus from my family right now._

He responds right away: _i understand. i’m here_ ...

He pauses.

“I’m here if you need me” sounds like something a professional doormat would say, and Jonah is proud of being less of one than he used to be. “I’m here _when_ you want to talk” is incredibly presumptuous and “I’m here _if_ you want to talk” has a whiff of passive aggressiveness to it, which Jonah tries to avoid as a rule. Finally, he settles on the scary but honest _i’m here if you want me_ and presses send before he can think too hard about it.

When he doesn’t hear from Amy for the next few days, he tells himself it’s fine, but as days turn into weeks he allows himself to be disappointed. She does text him as the period of radio silence approaches the three week mark, but it’s just commentary on _Parks and Rec_ , which she’s been intermittently working her way through for the past several months. Apparently she hates Tom Haverford and loves Li’l Sebastian. Jonah responds with an allcaps MISS YOU IN THE SADDEST FASHION and gets a =) for his trouble. The remaining weeks until they return to Cloud 9 are full of debate about whether Chris and Anne are a good couple (Jonah is pro, Amy is con), and how weird it is that no one in Pawnee seems to get what a nice guy Jerry is, and absolutely zero words about Amy’s or Jonah’s lives.  

* * *

Jonah arrived at Macalester already halfway consumed by guilt over spending his parents’ loan money on a liberal arts college and signed up for econ in an attempt to take something remotely practical. He hated it instantly but couldn’t bring himself to drop it, so he compromised by sitting in the back of the lecture hall and stealthily reading books about poker. He was trying to get better at poker. He currently hovered somewhere between “embarrassing” and “mortifying.”

Three weeks in, he was settled into his usual seat and taking notes (on his book, not on anything coming out of the professor’s mouth) when he felt someone tapping him on the arm. He turned, and upon seeing the guy next to him - short, dense, built like a brick shithouse, pretty much the breathing definition of Jonah’s type - very subtly tried not to swallow his tongue.

The guy jerked his chin towards Jonah’s book and said, “There’s a game in my dorm on Friday night if you’re looking to play.”

“I’m still learning,” Jonah managed, grateful beyond measure that his mouth hadn’t gone as offline as his brain felt. “I’m pretty awful.”

The guy smiled, widely and with teeth. “Then you should definitely come.” He held out a hand, under the writing desk and out of the professor’s sightline. “I’m Devon.”

Jonah grinned despite himself and shook Devon’s hand as subtly as he could. “Jonah.”

Devon leaned over and wrote his name, phone number, and dorm on Jonah’s notebook. “Definitely hope to see you Friday, man,” he said, and turned back to face the professor. His own focus now entirely shot, Jonah spent the remaining fifteen minutes of class doodling song lyrics on the back of his notebook and trying not to completely freak out.

Devon clapped him on the back as he was packing up after class. “Friday!” he said. “Don’t forget.”

Jonah smiled weakly. “Friday,” he repeated. He was at least moderately screwed.

Jonah was eighteen, and definitely not gay but definitely into dudes, and sort of closeted - could you even be closeted when you didn’t really know how to identify? - and _eighteen_ , and there was no part of Devon Recchio that he could handle. He couldn’t handle Devon’s face or his absurd body. He couldn’t handle the ease Devon had with his friends, all casual bro touches that Jonah kept hoping would linger (and didn’t). He couldn’t handle how good Devon was at poker. That last one was actually becoming a problem, because no amount of reading and practicing had made Jonah even halfway decent at poker. After getting cleaned out at three Friday games in a row, he was starting to seriously weigh the cost of a night spent looking at Devon and talking to Devon and, like, being near Devon, against another week spent carefully timing his meals to coincide with the dining halls being open because every cent he had earned the previous week was lining Devon’s pockets. But in addition to being ridiculously hot and upsettingly good at poker, Devon was apparently psychic, because a few days before the next weekly game he pulled Jonah aside and asked if he was interested in a different kind of game.

It turned out that Devon’s idea of a different kind of game was sportsbooks and he wanted to introduce Jonah to his bookie, a senior named Jay. Right away, betting on sports was more appealing to Jonah than poker. Instead of relying on his abilities to read people and do math on the fly, both of which sucked, sports betting felt learnable, more under his control. Jay had a website where bettors recorded their wagers, and they’d settle up with Jay in person at the end of the week. It took Jonah approximately half a heartbeat to fall down the google rabbit hole into sportsbook blogs and start reading up on college basketball as though it was his life’s ambition to become a student of the game. He picked up some extra hours at his part-time job to increase his liquidity, and it didn’t take long before he started _winning._ He couldn’t remember the last time anything felt so good.   

Jonah could never quite figure out why Devon introduced him to Jay. His best guess was that Devon got a cut of any business he brought Jay’s way, and his cut was more substantial than however much Jonah lost to him on Fridays. All he knew for sure was that after he met Jay, he stopped hearing from Devon. He wondered, later, if Devon could see the effect he had on Jonah, how much he overwhelmed Jonah’s baby queer sensibilities, and if that played a part in him deciding to pull Jonah into his orbit. He figured probably yes.    

* * *

It takes two full weeks after everyone is summoned back to Cloud 9, two full weeks of working alongside Amy, for Jonah to break. Frankly, he’s impressed with himself for holding out that long. He adores her, he’s pretty sure she’s been finding excuses for them to work together most days, and very suddenly, he is done. They’re working in the stock room - the paper goods delivery was late and Amy had drafted him to help her help the warehouse staff get it unloaded and organized as quickly as possible before Cloud 9 had a toilet-paper-based riot on its hands - and Amy is in the middle of a story about Emma’s math teacher when Jonah puts down the twelve pack of Charmin he’s holding, turns to look her full in the face and says, “I can’t stop thinking about kissing you.”

Amy’s face does a thing Jonah didn’t think faces could do outside of anime, eyes going comically wide and jaw actually dropping. “Jonah - ” she starts, and no. He is _done_.

“I’m sorry,” he says, “I know the timing is bad. But I can’t pretend it didn’t happen anymore, I can’t - I don’t have that, that thing, that gene or whatever, I can’t just pretend. We kissed and it was great, it was the best natural disaster I’ve ever had and now you’re getting divorced and I just - ” He stops mid-sentence, unsure suddenly. Her face hasn’t changed. He had hoped it might. “I just, I needed you to know,” he finishes lamely.

Amy is silent for a long moment. Then she closes her mouth so sharply he imagines he can hear her teeth click, turns, and walks out into the store, leaving him hip deep in value-priced paper products.

He gets through the rest of the day somehow, mostly by sticking to the mountain of crap in the stock room (which is definitely a two person job, and Jonah is not Cloud 9’s most stellar employee on his best day, so it does actually take him until the end of his shift to handle). He doesn’t see Amy again, and by the time he’s ready to leave she’s already clocked out. She was his ride home, so he takes the bus, which is, as usual, criminally late and very slow.

Garrett’s apartment is comfortable and feels very lived in by someone who is very clearly not Jonah. He’s doing his best to be unobtrusive, but he’s pretty sure he’s failing - just this morning Garrett was complaining about “people who think using every pan in the closet makes the food taste better.” Despite the fact that his wheelchair brings in the same quantity and variety of schmutz that shoes would, Garrett insists that Jonah take his shoes off before entering the apartment, so he drops his shoes on the welcome mat, makes a beeline for the second bedroom, and immediately changes into pajamas. He grimly settles in to watch as many episodes of _Brooklyn 99_ as it takes.

He’s halfway through his third and has begun to seriously consider laughing when he hears his phone buzz once, then again, insistently. He rolls over to put it on silent - whoever is texting him can absolutely go fuck themselves - but, fuck. Shit. Goddamn.

It’s Amy.

 _\- i wanted this to be a little more dramatic but you’re living in garrett’s apartment. can you come down please?  
_ _\- i’m parked right out front._

Jonah’s pretty sure he breaks land speed records getting out of bed, putting on his shoes, and hauling ass down the dangerously slippery staircase. He nearly falls twice and is pretty sure he’s bruised his hip by the time he gets to Amy’s car, which is, as promised, right in front of Garrett’s building. She raises her eyebrows at his visibly disheveled state but doesn’t say anything, just pops the lock so Jonah can get into the passenger seat.

Her eyebrows only go up further when he opens the door and she can fully see what he’s wearing. “Jonah,” she begins, then pauses as though unsure how to go on. “Is that - ” She pauses again, then says, “You’re wearing a Rams t-shirt so ugly that we wound up selling most of them to Dina to line her birdcages. Those are the Cardinals sweatpants we actually _stopped selling_ , Cloud 9 was willing to eat the entire cost of an item, because they literally dissolve in the wash, and - ” She glances once more at his feet as though hoping to find something different than she had upon first glance. “Are those SpongeBob slippers?”

Jonah shifts impatiently from SpongeBob to Patrick and back again. “Tornado,” he reminds her. “Lost literally everything I owned. Resupplied at the Cloud 9 in Richmond Heights because they accepted my employee discount and I was doing my best to stretch my FEMA checks. Can I get in the car now, or do you have more opinions about my wardrobe? Because I wasn’t exactly thinking about dressing to impress in the 45 seconds between getting your text and getting myself down here. For that matter, fucking ow,” he grumbles as he probes the hip he’d slammed into the banister. Yup, definitely bruised.

When he looks up, Amy is grinning like it’s her birthday. She gestures grandly to her passenger seat, and Jonah sits and buckles in. She pulls out smoothly and has gone a few blocks when Jonah says, “Where are we going?”

“My house,” Amy says. “Emma's with Adam, and I - really want to talk.”

“Sure,” Jonah responds carefully. “Talking’s great. All for it.”

They're relatively silent on the short ride to Amy's, one or both of them occasionally singing along to the radio. It's garbage, highly generic top 40, but Jonah can still bop to it. Amy’s laughing at him mugging to U + Ur Hand when they pull into her driveway.

She's careful with her keys, lets him in ahead of her so she can lock up, and he's completely unprepared for her hands on his shoulders turning him to face her as she says, “I know I said I wanted to talk, and I do, but first can we just - ” at which she kisses him and wow, okay, yes, he can do this.

He absolutely cannot do this. He breaks the kiss after a few seconds but keeps his hands on her, rests his forehead on hers. “It’s not that I don’t want to,” he says quietly, “I want to more than I can remember wanting anything in recent memory, I just - you walked away, I - ”

There’s a thing that happens to Jonah when he’s with someone he wants who wants him back. It’s what was happening at the wedding and it’s part of why ‘sexy’ fell out of his face as though it was a reasonable thing to say. When he’s with someone that he knows is a sure thing, he is occasionally able to relax and act like a confident person. He’s been told it’s extremely attractive. It is the inverse of what’s going on right now. In this moment, he can’t remember the last time he felt like less of a sure thing.

He just likes her so fucking much.   

Amy huffs out a breath, and Jonah can tell she’s counting backwards from ten in her head. “Jonah,” she finally says, voice controlled. She’s pulled away to rest her head on his shoulder, but she hasn’t tried to step out of his arms, for which he is grateful. “I’m getting divorced. It’s basically the weirdest thing I’ve ever done. I’ve been with Adam since I was not much older than Emma, I have no idea what it’s like to be single as a grown-up. Or even as a teenager.” She sighs. “It’s … scary. And then you said what you said, and like - yeah, I’ve obviously been thinking about it too, but part of me was like, who does this asshole think he is? You just got rid of one guy and now someone else wants to like, swoop in and, I don’t know.” She’s clearly frustrated. “This is why I was hoping we could skip talking,” she says finally.

“Well,” Jonah says, once he’s allowed the silence to unroll a little bit more, once he’s sure that she’s done. “I definitely am not trying to … swoop.”

“I know!” she exclaims. “I know you’re not. You’re not a swooper.” She laughs softly and runs her fingers up and down his spine, almost casually.

He smiles, slips a hand up her back and brings it to rest on the back of her neck. “Here’s my plan,” he says. He’s starting to feel calmer. “I’m going to assume that you bringing me here means something.”

Amy sighs like she’s letting go of something. “Yes,” she says.

“I’m going to assume that things are kind of up in the air for you right now, and you’re not in a position to make promises or commitments.”

Amy seems like she might be trying to climb inside Jonah’s hideous Rams t-shirt. “Yes,” she says, skimming her lips over his collarbone.

Jonah slips his hand around to cup her jaw, and then they don’t talk for awhile.

They wind up in her bed - it’s not her and Adam’s bed, it’s _her_ bed, she tells him as they fall into it, Adam took their bed with him when he moved out and rather than try to move the guest bed from the guest bedroom into the master, she just moved into the guest bedroom - and Jonah can barely remember how to breathe with Amy on top of him like this. There’s a moment before she takes her shirt off - he shed the Rams t-shirt and Cards sweatpants pretty much as soon as it became clear that was allowed - there’s a moment where she hesitates, and when he says quietly, “What, what’s up,” her answer is delivered to his chest.

“You look really good, Jonah.” Her voice is soft. “And I’ve seen the girls you date. I mean, at least they’re not skinny blonde white girls. But none of them look like they’ve had a baby.”

Jonah runs his hands up her thighs to rest at the crease where they meet her torso. He loves her thick thighs. “Are you seriously feeling insecure about your body right now?” he asks. “Amy, I - I love your body.” He blushes. “You’re, uh, you’re actually built more like the majority of people I’ve dated over the years than Kristen or Naomi were.” She looks skeptical, and he says, “I will absolutely take my phone out right now and show you pictures if you want, but, uh, I’m kind of into what we’re doing, here.” He punctuates his sentence by moving his hands to her breasts and stroking, over her t-shirt and bra. She arches, then rolls her eyes at herself and finishes taking her clothes off.

The sex is extremely good. Jonah knows he’s good in bed - he takes pride in his work, is how he puts it to himself (and exactly zero other people, because it’s basically the most dickish thing he permits himself to think) - and he is paying intense attention to every move of Amy’s body, every sound she makes. She’s close before he is. When she comes, her hand working frantically between their bodies, he thinks that he can’t remember the last time he felt this good.

They rearrange themselves after he comes too, his head on her chest and his arm wrapped around her middle. She’s running her fingers aimlessly through his hair. He feels fucking great. He feels perfect. She’s perfect.

“I never cheated on Adam,” she says.

He waits.

“I never did,” she repeats. Her fingers are still moving over his scalp. “I could have, a couple times. But even when I wanted to....” She sighs. “I just thought, you know, I looked at people having affairs, and I thought, ‘Just leave. Just have the balls to leave.’” She shifts under him; he goes to move, to give her space for whatever she wants to do, but she just pulls him closer, her arm tight around his shoulders. “And I was never ready to leave,” she continues. “Until now. I wasn’t ready to leave until I was ready to leave.”

He hmm’s into her skin. He’s remembering that day in the warehouse shortly after he started at Cloud 9, when he wanted to give her something real and wound up lying. He’s remembering telling her that he got in his car and stopped for a sandwich. He’s remembering when that guy he went to business school with came to the store, the nauseous swoop of his stomach and the prickling of sweat as he wondered desperately what Rex actually knew about why he left school. He’s remembering every time Mateo talks about his experiences of dating men like they’re universal.

“I, uh.” He shifts. “I need to tell you some things.”

Amy’s hand stills, and then she’s moving away, dislodging him from her warmth. “What?” she says, pulling the sheet up higher. “Are you married? Do you have kids? Did you move to St. Louis because you didn’t want to pay child support and you hoped she wouldn’t find you here?” One look at Amy’s face tells Jonah that she’s dead serious.

“No!” he practically yells. “Ames, just - come back over here, please? Nothing like that, okay?” He gestures, a weird hand wave that he hopes appropriately conveys ‘please resume cuddling.’ “Just - please?”

She’s literally side-eying him as she does so, but she comes back over, pulls him back onto her chest. He can see the trepidation in her eyes; he knows she’s taking a risk, trusting him.

“You know I had a gambling problem,” he starts.

“I - I mean, sure,” she says. “I know you mentioned it that time.”

“Well, it was … ” He sighs. Stops. “It got really bad,” he says, finally. “I didn’t spend two days in the hospital because of dehydration.”

She waits.

“I owed this guy a bunch of money,” he says. “A guy from school, I borrowed money from him so I could cover my debts to my bookie after a really bad week. And it wasn’t like he was coming to break my knees or anything, but he wasn’t …. the least scary person in the world. So one day I came home and I started looking around for things I could sell. I was dating someone at the time, we were living together, and he got home - ”

He hears Amy make - some kind of sound, at the pronoun. Welp. There goes the hope that he could slide that in under the radar. “It’s fine, Amy,” he says calmly. He feels selfishly glad he’s not looking at her face. “I’m not gay. I date women and I date men, and at the time I was dating Craig. Anyway, he came home and found that I’d sold the TV and, he had this really nice electric piano - he was a musician - and I’d sold the electric piano. But it was football season and I had a bunch of bets on the playoffs, and I figured I could just buy new shit when I won that weekend.” He laughs. There's no humor in it. “When I won. Anyway. When he came home, he saw that the TV was gone and the electric piano was gone and I was sitting there looking crazy - we’d been together for about a year, he knew what was going on. He knew I gambled too much. But it had never been like this, and so he …. very much broke my jaw.” Jonah does not look at Amy. He takes comfort in the fact that her hand is still in his hair. “Just - ” he clicks his tongue, mimes a slow left hook - “and I’m on the ground.

“Anyway. I was in the hospital for a few days. Then I withdrew from my second semester of business school and used the student loan money I had left to pay Craig back for his stuff and, like, cover rent and shit for the next few months, while I learned about the wonderful world of Anonymous meetings.”

“ …. The people who wear masks and post shit on the internet?” Amy says, and she sounds so honestly baffled that Jonah laughs, this time for real.

"No, Ames,” he says, burrowing closer to her. “Gamblers Anonymous. Like AA but for people who bet the house on the ponies.” He slides into a bad impression of John Mulaney doing a good impression of Ice-T at the end, and isn't shocked when Amy cranes her neck around to look at him like he's losing his mind. “Anyway,” he says, flapping a hand to wave off the bad joke. “GA.”

There's a pause, then Amy says hesitantly, “What was it like?”

Jonah kind of chuckles. “God. It was fine, _I_ was a fucking disaster. On the one hand, I was so scared and embarrassed and ashamed about what I’d done, but on the other hand - ” He stops, trying to figure out how to distill the combination of shame and rage that had fuelled him during his first few meetings into something she can understand.

“So, I’d been dating Craig for a year - just hang on, I’ll connect all the dots,” he says in answer to the question she’s starting to voice. “He was my first boyfriend,” Jonah continues. “I’d been sleeping with guys for years, but Craig was the first one who ever got serious. And it’s - really different, having a boyfriend versus casual stuff. You see a different side of things. Uh … sometimes an ugly side. And one of the ways I dealt with that was by basically becoming the poster child for ‘Out and Proud.’” He actually makes the air quotes. “I introduced him to my entire extended family, I looked for ways to work ‘my boyfriend’ into the conversation when I met someone new - kind of a ‘come at me, bro’ attitude.”

“Why am I not surprised,” Amy mutters, and Jonah hugs her close for a second.

“So there I was at my first GA meeting,” he says. “Even though Craig and I were broken up, I was obviously going to have to talk about him a lot - I mean, my jaw was still wired. And I still felt very aggressive and political about our relationship, even though it was over. So it came time for me to share, and I said, ‘Hey, I'm Jonah. I'm here because I sold my ex boyfriend's stuff to cover some playoff bets, and then he broke my jaw.’ And then I waited for someone to call me a faggot.”

Amy’s hand twitches and he can feel the question coming - did that ever happen to you - but it doesn't, and he's grateful that she puts it together herself. He still remembers stumbling over his introduction at GA, distinctly aware that he could disappear back in the closet if he wanted to, wondering if he was co-opting an experience of oppression that no longer belonged to him. Deciding that the answer to all of those questions was to be extra emphatic about things.

“Nobody did, of course,” he says with a laugh. “Even if someone in there was homophobic, recovering addicts don’t throw a lot of stones. Anyway, it helped until it didn't, and by then my money was running out and I needed to figure out what I was going to do next. And I remembered that my cousin Damian was living down here and had a spare room, so I came down, and Cloud 9 was the first job I could find that was hiring and didn’t ask too many questions about why I left business school.”

There is a long silence. “And your parents?” Amy finally asks.

Jonah fidgets. “My parents think I failed out of business school and I’m running away from my problems. My mom keeps emailing me articles about quarter life crises. They don’t actually have the money you guys think they do,” he says, almost conversationally. “I could move home again if I wanted, but it’s not like they’re in a position to support me. They haven’t kicked me off the cell phone plan yet, but that’s about as far as it goes.”

There’s a silence, then - “Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

“About my family?” he asks.

“Any of it,” she says quietly. “I mean - I get why you didn’t want to talk about the stuff with the gambling, and your break-up, but - I mean, we make fun of you for your rich family all the fucking time.”

“At first I didn’t want to be some whiny white dude not-all-men’ing up every conversation,” he says. “And then I didn’t think anyone would believe me. Plus, if I just went along with everyone’s ideas, I didn’t have to talk about the really shitty stuff.” He shrugs. “It’s fine. I know being able to move home and not having any dependents is an advantage a lot of people at the store don’t have. I know I could probably get a better paying job if I wanted one. I’m a middle class white guy who passes for straight, I can take my lumps.” He shrugs. “But, you know. I also have a boatload of debt, and a pretty serious gambling addiction that I’m still trying to deal with, and TMJ from the whole ‘my boyfriend broke my jaw’ thing. And also I just told the girl I’m in love with that I sometimes fuck dudes and I’m kind of freaking out about whether or not she’s going to keep wanting me. So.” He mumbles that last part into her ribs.

There's another silence, then Amy … laughs? That can't be right, but he turns around to look and she's shaking with it, her hand over her mouth. “I'm sorry,” she gasps, “I'm sorry, I just - ”

Jonah stares. He has no idea what's happening right now.

“Jonah,” Amy says when she's finally gotten herself under control. She's smiling, which is better than the alternative. “You just told me that you had a gambling problem so bad that you _sold your boyfriend's stuff and dropped out of school,_ and you’re worried that the part of that sentence that's gonna be a problem for me is ‘boyfriend’?” She pulls him closer, kisses the top of his head.

He can tell she thinks it's more of his social justice warrior politics run amok, his privilege causing him to lose perspective on what regular people think is important. He shifts in her arms, finally says quietly, “It would just be worse. I'd understand the gambling thing - I _do_ understand it - but the guy thing … would be worse.”

“ … oh,” she says quietly, and pulls him even closer. That answers that, anyway.

They sit in silence for a minute before she ventures, “Do you? Still gamble?”

He shakes his head. “Not since then. And that time at the store, that was fucking stupid and an excellent reminder of the fact that I can't.  Not even a little bit, not even for fun. And you know - ” he opens his mouth wide and his jaw clicks, loudly; he winces - “in case I forget I have this excellent mnemonic device.”

He rubs the hinge of his jaw, then closes his eyes. He feels knocked the fuck out.

Then - “You can't,” Amy says quietly. “Emma's future is the most important thing in the world, and you can't. No mistakes, no second chances. I swear to god, you bet on a balloon game at the carnival and it's over.”

He sits up, looks her in the eye. Takes her hand. This is the most serious he's ever been. “I know,” he says. “Amy, I know.”

She nods, looks decisive and scared and convicted. She's the most beautiful thing he's ever seen.

“Then, okay,” she says.  

He raises his eyebrows. “Okay?”

“Okay,” she repeats. “Okay, you’re a … bisexual gambling addict who, sadly for me, is not the poor little rich boy everyone thought you were. And okay, you told me you love me back there, I noticed, Jonah. There was just a lot of other stuff going on in that sentence.”

His stomach takes a nosedive. But - “yeah,” he says softly. “I know what I said before, I’m not trying to get you to make any commitments you’re not ready for, but - yeah.” He’s looking down at her knees and running his hand back and forth over the short hair on the back of his head.

Her hand sneaks into his line of vision, slips under his chin and tilts his head up. “Okay to that too,” she says softly.

* * *

_Two Weeks Later_

“ … I’m not even sure if I like him, but he better fucking want to to see me again!”

Jonah rolls his eyes and, reaching down to take the fully dressed mannequin torso Amy is handing up, sees her making the same expression. Mateo has been complaining to Cheyenne about the most recent guy he went out with for what feels like an hour, and Jonah’s patience ran out many minutes ago.

“Why don’t you text him?” Cheyenne asks from inside a circular rack of last season’s blouses.

“I already texted him!” Mateo exclaims. “Remember, I told him I had sausage for lunch? Ugh, you wouldn’t understand. It’s different with guys.”

“I never found that to be the case,” Jonah says, and then he takes a minute to wonder who said that. He has the time, because all three of his coworkers have fallen dead silent.

“I’m sorry?” Mateo finally says after about thirty seconds.

Jonah’s stomach belatedly falls down to his feet as he turns to sit on the ladder he’d previously been crouching on to position the mannequin. “I just never found it to be that different, dating guys and girls,” he says. “Every person is different, but in their own way.” He clasps his hands in front of him, elbows on his knees. He’s pretty sure no one can see him shaking from this high up.

Mateo’s eyes are dinner plates. “What the hell are you talking about?” he asks. “When did you …. date guys?” He says the last part like he’s asking Jonah when he got diagnosed with tuberculosis.

“College,” Jonah says. “And after college. And in business school. Pretty much the same times I dated girls.”

Mateo appears to be desperately searching for words to adequately describe his state of high dudgeon, but what he ultimately comes up with is a sputtered, “You’re lying! Prove it.” He crosses his arms over his chest for punctuation.

Jonah rolls his eyes openly, but he comes down off the ladder and takes out his phone to show Mateo the picture of him and Craig that’s been saved in his Google photos account for years. It’s a promotional shot from a club, the kind of picture that a hired photographer takes and posts on the club’s Facebook page or Instagram. Jonah’s got his arm hooked around Craig’s neck, and their lower bodies are pressed together from hips to feet, legs intertwined. Craig’s face is hidden in Jonah’s neck. Jonah’s got his head back, clearly laughing, and his other hand rests on Craig’s lower back as though he’s trying to pull him even closer. When he’d shown it to Amy, she said it was one of the least heterosexual things she’d ever seen, and she’d seen _Y Tu Mama Tambien._

“That’s Craig,” Jonah says, handing the phone off. “We were together about a year.”

Mateo spends a few seconds staring at the picture before shoving the phone back at Jonah - he actually has to scramble to catch it - and storming off wordlessly. Cheyenne stumbles out from the clothes rack, blouses flying everywhere, and runs after him with a popeyed look at Jonah tossed over her shoulder.

“You realize everyone who works here is going to know about this in under five minutes,” Amy says quietly, from behind Jonah.

He turns around, pulls her close. “Yeah.”

“You’re okay?” she asks quietly, concern clearly present in her voice.

“I actually am,” he says. “It’s kind of nice. I liked being out the first time, so … ” He laughs self-consciously, kisses her hair.

It’s about then that they hear “WHAT?!” coming from the stock room.

“Aaaaand Marcus,” Jonah says.

Amy laughs, then stops. “Wait,” she says, “is he - ”

Jonah looks down at her, eyebrows raised. “Ames,” he says in disbelief.

“I don’t know!” she yelps, disgruntled. “Stupid straight person, what do I know?!”

Jonah bends down, whispers, “Marcus spends more time thinking about cock than I did when I was regularly sucking one,” then kisses her on the cheek and turns around just in time.

“Hi Marcus,” he asks. “What can I do ya for?”

Amy splutters, and Jonah smiles. It’s going to be a heavenly day.

**Author's Note:**

> This story was born when I realized that most of what we think we know about Jonah is based on other characters' conjectures about him, rather than anything he's affirmed or any facts that have been presented. I am a person with a Complicated Relationship To Social Class, and one of the things I struggle with while watching Superstore is knowing Jonah can be kind of a dick while simultaneously feeling he's being treated unfairly while simultaneously seeing the very real emotions behind that unfair treatment. In short, Superstore gives me way too many feelings for a half hour sitcom about Walmart, so I took those feelings and wrote a fic about them.
> 
> I also really badly want Jonah and Amy to smush their faces together. That was also a very strong motivating factor.
> 
> I don't actually know anything about gambling, but I did some research and tried to make the gambling parts as realistic as I could. Where realism seemed out of reach, I went for vague. Apologies if I hit any glaringly wrong notes. I am extremely open to constructive criticism on this topic.


End file.
